Category Archives: disaster

An editorial entitled Britain Under Water, from the Belfast Telegraph, via equaintance Danny Bloom: Most remarkable of all is the fact that the astonishing picture the nation   is now witnessing – whole towns cut off, gigantic areas underwater, mass   evacuations, infrastructure paralyzed and grotesquely swollen rivers, from the Severn and the Thames downwardsContinue reading “Britain Under Water (As Predicted by Boring Scientists)”

A great anecdote (and cover) from the Independent in Britain: In April 1989 Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, gave her Cabinet a seminar on global warming at No 10 and one of the speakers was the scientist and green guru James Lovelock. A reporter asked him afterwards what would be the first signs of globalContinue reading “Welcome to the Weather of the 21st Century”

That’s according to Time. Remarkably, the cover story leads with the importance of wetlands, as a natural defense against hurricanes (and a natural protector for levees). The same dynamic, on a much less dramatic scale, can be found in Southern California, where only after trapping rivers in concrete did we slowly come to realize thatContinue reading “Environmental Ignorance Threatens New Orleans”

That’s the answer for Australia and the Southeast, apparently. Enviros might point out that Australia has long considered to be especially susceptible to drought as the globe heats up, but that would be bad form. Forget the fact that the drought there is now the worst it has been in a 1,000 years. Drought isContinue reading “The Denier Answer to Drought: Prayer”

The Lake Tahoe fires have died down, but the discussion has just begun. In The Los Angeles Times, the focus has been on the forest and the population issues. Moderate political columnist George Skelton drew this lesson: There’s no economy in numbers because of an exploding population — no growth discount for taxpayers funding theContinue reading “Fire Over: Arguing Begins”

James Hansen is everywhere. Kind of like Cassandra. Speaking of the West and fire, Hansen and forty-six co-authors warn in a paper last month for Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics: An expansion and intensification of subtropical dry conditions occurs consistently with global warming in our climate simulations (Hansen et al., 2005a, 2007a). Held and Soden (2006)Continue reading “Lake Tahoe Fires and James Hansen”